Intercity Transportation Research Articles

Vulnerability analysis of the Chinese coupled aviation and high-speed railway network

The integrated aviation and High-Speed Railway (HSR) transportation system plays a vital role for today’s inter-city transportation services. However, an increasing number of unexpected disruptions (such as operation failures, natural disasters, or intentional attacks) pose a considerable threat to the normal operation of the system, especially on ground transfer, leading to the extensive research on its vulnerability. Previous approaches mainly focus on interruptions within a single transportation mode, neglecting the role of ground transfer which serves as a coupled connection between aviation and High-Speed Railway. This paper proposes a network-based framework for evaluating the vulnerability of the Chinese Coupled Aviation and High-Speed Railway (CAHSR) network from the viewpoint of ground transfer interruption. Taking the end-to-end travel time and passenger flow information into consideration as an evaluation measure and analyzing from the perspective of urban agglomerations, an adaptive method is developed to identify the critical cities and further investigate their failure impacts on the geographic distribution of vulnerability. In addition, the proposed model explores variations of vulnerability under different failure time intervals. Based on the empirical study, some major conclusions are highlighted as follows: (A) Only a few cities show significant impacts on the network’s vulnerability when ground transfer interruptions occurred. (B) The distribution of vulnerability is not proportional to the distance between failure city and influenced city. (C) The vulnerability is more serious in the morning and evening when the ground transfer is disconnected. Our findings may provide new insights for maintenance and optimization of the CAHSR network and other real-world transportation networks.

Nonlinear Response Relationship Between Ozone and Precursor Emissions in the Pearl River Delta Region Under Different Transmission Channels

With the rapid development of urbanization, ozone (O3) pollution is an ongoing occurrence in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in China. The effective control of O3 pollution is a great challenge owing to the nonlinear relationship between O3 and precursor emissions and the effect of meteorological conditions. Based on the regional air quality model CAMx-OSAT (ozone source apportionment technology), O3 formation regimes were determined, and inter-city transportation across PRD was quantified under different transmission channels. The results showed that spatial differences were observed for the O3 formation regimes under different transmission channels. The VOCs-sensitive regime was mainly located in the central areas of the PRD region, and the NOx-sensitive regime was distributed in the suburban areas of the PRD regions under calm wind conditions. When the northeast wind was prevailing, the polluted air mass of the urban agglomeration was transmitted southwesterly downward, resulting in the downwind areas being transformed to VOCs-sensitive; the upwind areas were still NOx-sensitive. Under the southeast wind, the VOCs-sensitive regime had a banding distribution along the southeast-northwest direction, and the remaining areas were NOx-sensitive. With the influence of transmission channels, downwind cities were significantly affected by the transmission of upwind urban agglomerations (41%-87%), whereas the local formation was the main contributor under the calm wind conditions (60%-87%). To explore the relationship between O3 and precursor emissions, a series of sensitivity tests were designed. The results showed that maximized areas (20%-36%) with reductions in O3 can be achieved by reducing VOCs and NOx in the corresponding sensitive regimes, and the maximized level with the reduction in O3 can be fulfilled by reducing VOCs in the VOCs-sensitive regime. For the typical city Jiangmen, the area that met the standard increased the most under the calm wind (11%) and southeast wind (8%) conditions when VOCs and NOx were reduced in the corresponding sensitive regimes. Additionally, under northeast wind conditions, reducing VOCs in the VOCs-sensitive regime can more effectively control O3, as the area up to the standard increased by 140%.

МЕТОДИКА ПОДБОРА ВОДИТЕЛЕЙ С УЧЕТОМ ПСИХОФИЗИОЛОГИЧЕСКИХ ОСОБЕННОСТЕЙ ПО ВИДАМ ВЫПОЛНЯЕМОЙ ТРАНСПОРТНОЙ РАБОТЫ

The article presents an analysis of the process of interaction of a motor transport enterprise with a psychological service, the result of which is a study of the psychophysiological characteristics of the driver. Significant psychophysiological indicators have been determined that affect the efficiency of various types of transport work. A methodology has been proposed that allows differentiating drivers by the transport work performed: urban and intercity transportation, freight and passenger transportation based on a study of psychophysiological features.

Analysis of thermal comfort models of users of public urban and intercity transport

Regardless of the vehicle's application, the thermal comfort of the vehicle's occupants and driver is given increased attention. Maintaining a sense of thermal comfort, whether for safety, health or occupant thermal well-being reasons, is one of the most important goals of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. There are a significant number of physical variables that affect thermal comfort. Therefore, evaluating thermal comfort has always been a complex issue and has attracted the attention of researchers. The feeling of thermal comfort is provided by factors that depend on the heat exchange between the human body and the external environment. It is well known that one of the requirements to be fulfilled is to find a person in thermal neutrality in the environment according to the comfort equation. The article describes and evaluates the following indicators: DTS (dynamic thermal sensitivity), TS (thermal sensitivity), PMV (predicted mean voice) and PPD (predicted percentage of dissatisfaction). The most common models for evaluating thermal comfort, namely the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV), Taniguchi’s model, Zhang’s model and Nilsson’s model in a variety of car cabin conditions, have been reviewed. The limitations of these models in terms of the objectivity of the results obtained are analysed.

Key Points and Scheme Comparison of Urban Expressway Traffic Design

As the main link connecting the city, suburbs and industrial parks, the expressway must meet the needs of inter-city expressway transportation on the one hand, and play a role in supporting the normal operation of the city on the other hand. This paper firstly analyzes the main characteristics of China's urban expressways according to the current research situation, and proposes three key points for the design of China's urban expressway traffic system. The two methods are compared and selected, which proves the rationality of the design focus of China's urban expressway traffic system. The thesis proposes that in the overall design process, various factors such as the characteristics and scale of urban highways, urban geographical environment and social and economic development trends should be taken into account to ensure that the overall planning and design of highways meet the actual requirements of the city, and provide the basis for future highway construction projects. It provides a solid foundation for the smooth development.

Polestar++: An Intelligent Routing Engine for National-Wide Public Transportation

Public transportation plays a critical role in peoples daily life. It has been proven that public transportation is more environmentally sustainable, efficient, and economical than any other forms of travel. However, due to the increasing expansion of transportation networks and more complex travel situations, people are having difficulties in efficiently finding the most preferred route from one place to another through public transportation systems for both intra-city and inter-city trips. To this end, in this paper, we present Polestar++, a data-driven engine for intelligent and efficient public transportation routing. Specifically, we first propose a novel hierarchical public transportation graph(HPTG) to model both intra-city and inter-city public transportation in terms of various travel costs, such as time or distance. Then, we introduce a general route search algorithm coupled with an efficient station binding method for efficient route candidate generation. After that, we propose a two-pass route candidate ranking module to capture user preferences under dynamic travel situations. Finally, experiments on two real-world data sets demonstrate the advantages of Polestar++ in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. To date, Polestar++ is servicing over 330 cities, answers over a hundred millions of queries each day, and achieves substantial improvement of user click ratio.

Urban mobility and the impacts caused by Covid-19

This pandemic portrayed the country's social and economic inequality in terms of health services, work and social distancing. It was found that the spread of Covid-19 on a global scale is favored by the circulation of infected people and/or objects; changing the circulation in many land and air borders that needed to have restricted and/or closed accesses, including, the reduction and even the suspension of travels inside and outside countries, whose displacements are by road, rail, river and sea. In view of this, the search for measures to face the pandemic within the various socio-economic contexts, such as in this case of urban mobility, for example, the occupancy limit of 50% of seats in intercity transport and the mandatory use of masks. Urban mobility permeates as a social right and essential service, which needs to continue to function with due health care. It is necessary to maintain social distance and take due care. For the country to remain in this confrontation, it is necessary to guarantee democratic access to the city, together with measures to protect social actors from contamination by the New Coronavirus.

Organization of coordinated functioning of various types of passenger transport in transport-interchange hubs

The article deals with the organization of high-quality interaction of various types of passenger transport in the transport- interchange hub. Urban and regional interchange hubs are being studied. A methodology based on the use of quantitative methods and implemented with the help of software products (the developed program "Effective transfers" and the well-known simulation modeling programs PTV Visum, AnyLogic) is suggested. This method is applicable for any city and includes 3 stages. At the first stage, the number of passengers in the transport-interchange hubs who transfer from one type of urban public transport to another is predicted; the direction of passenger traffic is determined; urban routes that require schedule approval are chosen. At the second stage, the number of passengers who use the considered transport-interchange hub to transfer from suburban, intercity transport to urban modes of transport is predicted. At the third stage, the schedule of all types of transport is coordinated; the need for rolling stock is determined; passenger traffic is modeled and studied at the hub in order to rationally organize the planning structure of the transport-interchange hub. The obtained scientific results can be used in the design of a system of transport and transfer hubs and planning the placement of transport and social facilities on the territory of the transport-interchange hub.

ANALYSIS OF INTERURBAN MOBILITY IN BRAZIL USING AN ORIGIN-DESTINATION MATRIX BY MOBILE PHONE BIG DATA

Interurban mobility from a systemic and integrated perspective is not much studied in Brazil. It comprises the movements that take place between cities, with the objective of meeting non-daily needs, through different modals of transport and different dimensions of administrative management. The use of a big data with mobile phone information in Brazil, modeling techniques and the crossing with secondary data from different sources, allowed an unprecedented overview at this mobility, and exposes how this integrated vision can contribute to the improvement of the planning. The results demonstrate a distinct mobility for different Brazilian locations. The accessibility offered to the population presents regional differences, and the data indicate that the more than 2 billion individual trips made annually considered different parameters for their travel and modal choices, in addition to the cost and time of transportation. Intercity transportation by car is the majority (58%), mainly due to the limited supply of services and infrastructure in other modes (just 1% of domestic connections have more than one mode of transportation offered). However, air transport (25%) and road transport by bus (17%) have a significant contribution to the modal division of transport production.

Investigation on the difference of PM2.5 transport flux between the North China Plain and the Sichuan Basin

In this study, an advanced transport flux method based on the comprehensive stereoscopic observation verification was used to evaluate the contribution of transport to pollution in the North China Plain (NCP) and Sichuan Basin (SCB). The simulations were verified using fixed-point lidar and satellite observations, and the results demonstrated that the modeling flux calculation method was suitable for investigating the evolutionary trend of PM2.5 flux. The monthly inflow, outflow, and net flux indicated the intensive interactions and significant temporal and spatial variations of PM2.5 transport though the boundary segment of the city and region. In both autumn and winter, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region always played the role of “source” region, while Cheng-Yu (CY) region principally acted as a “convergence” region. In autumn and winter, the BTH region was controlled by a cold front weather system, and the pollutants were readily transported to the surrounding areas. However, the CY region was affected by the complex terrain, with small wind speeds near the ground and poor horizontal diffusion. The upper air was controlled by the northwestern winds behind the trough, and the air subsidence is substantial. The combined action of horizontal and vertical wind directions caused the accumulation of pollutants in the basin. Notably, one intrinsic transport pathway during two representative months was identified based on the investigation of cross-city and cross-region transport, namely the southwest–northeast (SW–NE) pathway in the BTH region. In the CY region, the northeastern transport pathway greatly influenced the cities in the basin. Additionally, through the analysis of the typical heavy pollution processes in the two regions, it was found that the southwest pathway of the BTH region and northeast pathway of the CY region in inter-city transport were significant factors before reaching the most severe stage of pollution.

Emissions based tolls – Impacts on the total emissions of an intercity corridor

• Emissions costs of intercity transport activity are increasingly relevant. • Different road charge methods may affect emissions, costs and revenue? • The proposed system enables the maintenance of revenue and average user costs. • The current system only covers average motorway emissions. Around 70% of the transport-related emissions in the EU came from road transportation. A major contribution to the transport-related emission externalities comes from all the passenger car trips generated in intercity corridors. The main objective of this paper is to explore alternative road sharing solutions to reducing externalities from individual transportation in intercity corridors without increasing the cost each user would pay to travel through the Motorway. Specifically, it intends to assess how generalised GPS-based toll systems can reduce system emissions compared with a flat-electronic collection system. Simulation experiment results on a case study in Portugal comprising alternative routes of approximately 60 km show the proposed GPS-based toll (with different strategies for peak and off-peak hour) can influence the total emissions with only a small decrease of the total revenue without sacrificing the cost that each user would pay to travel through this corridor.

Influence of operating conditions on changes in wear parameters of ICE mating

Regularities of wear of mating of internal combustion engines operated in different conditions are discussed and analyzed. Regularities of wear of part mating in the process of technical operation of a motor vehicle are obtained. The correlation coefficients and the correspondence of the obtained regularities of wear to the experimental data have been determined. According to the research results, it was determined that during intercity transportation compared to transportation in settlements, the wear rate was lower by 47.7 % for cylinder liners, by 45.8 % for piston rings, by 40.12 % for connecting rod bearings and by 39.2 % for crankshaft necks. The research results can be applied when calculating connection resources in assembly units of machines.

Diagnostic analysis of regional ozone pollution in Yangtze River Delta, China: A case study in summer 2020

A regional ozone (O3) pollution event occurred in the Yangtze River Delta region during August 17–23, 2020 (except on August 21). This study aims to understand the causes of O3 pollution during the event using an emission-based model (i.e., the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model) and an observation-based model (OBM). The OBM was used to investigate O3 sensitivity to its precursors during the O3 pollution, concluding that O3 formation was limited by volatile organic compounds (VOCs) on August 19, but was co-limited by VOCs and nitrogen oxides (NOx) on other polluted days. Aromatics and alkenes were the two main VOC groups contributing to the O3 formation, with trans-2-butene and m/p-xylene as the key species among the VOCs measured at the Nanjing urban site. The source apportionment results estimated using the source-oriented CMAQ model suggest that the transportation and industry sources dominated the non-background O3 production in Nanjing, which were responsible for 52% and 24.7%, respectively. The O3 concentration attributed to NOx (~70%) was significantly higher than that attributed to VOCs (approximately 30%). The process analysis revealed that vertical mixing increased the O3 concentrations in the early morning, and photochemical reactions promoted O3 formation and accumulation during the daytime within the planetary boundary layer. At night, outflow from horizontal transport and nocturnal chemistry jointly resulted the O3 depletion. The contributions of inter-city transport during the O3 pollution period in Nanjing were also estimated. The predicted O3 concentration was largely recorded from long-distance regions, reaching 46%, followed by local sources (38%) and surrounding cities (16%). The results indicate that both NOx and VOCs contributed significantly to O3 pollution during this event, and the emissions controls of NOx and the key VOC species of aromatics and alkenes from a cooperative regional perspective should be considered to mitigate O3 pollution.

A Study on the Examination of the Geologic Structure in terms <br /> of Rail Transportation

Rail systems have an important place among the types of transportation. Although it was preferred for intercity transportation in the past, but now-a-days it is frequently preferred in urban roads. Some rail system structures move from the ground surface, while others move under the ground. Various geotechnical researches have been carried out for rail systems moving under the ground. However, for the rail vehicles moving on the ground surface are generally placed on the highway route, ground parameters are not taken into consideration. This situation can cause serious rail system accidents. This study has been conducted in Turkey's Erzurum drilling planned light rail system in terms of soil properties, it was evaluated by survey results of drilling borehole, microtremor, and multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW). According to the results of this study, a part of the light rail system (LRS) route was found to be insufficient in terms of ground safety. For this reason, improvement in the ground or revision of the route has been suggested.

Modelling impacts of high-speed rail on urban interaction with social media in China’s mainland

ABSTRACT High-Speed Rail (HSR) has increasingly become an important mode of inter-city transportation between large cities. Inter-city interaction facilitated by HSR tends to play a more prominent role in promoting urban and regional economic integration and development. Quantifying the impact of HSR’s interaction on cities and people is therefore crucial for long-term urban and regional development planning and policy making. We develop an evaluation framework using toponym information from social media as a proxy to estimate the dynamics of such impact. This paper adopts two types of spatial information: toponyms from social media posts, and the geographical location information embedded in social media posts. The framework highlights the asymmetric nature of social interaction among cities, and proposes a series of metrics to quantify such impact from multiple perspectives – including interaction strength, spatial decay, and channel effect. The results show that HSRs not only greatly expand the uneven distribution of inter-city connections, but also significantly reshape the interactions that occur along HSR routes through the channel effect.

Static Analysis of Trailers with Demountable Chassis

Today, trailers are the most used vehicles in intercity and international road transport. There are serious difficulties in the production processes and post-production shipments of these vehicles. Trailer chassis are generally produced in welded structures. In this study, the trailer chassis produced in welded structure was transformed into a bolted structure. A nonlinear finite element model was created and static analyzes of the demountable chassis trailer have been made. In these analyzes, stress and deformation data on the chassis part of the trailer were observed. It is concluded that the deformation of the chassis under these loads is at an acceptable level. As a result, it has been shown that welded structures in trailer chassis can be transformed into bolted structures and there is no problem in terms of safety.

Injury-severity analysis of intercity bus crashes in Ghana: A random parameters multinomial logit with heterogeneity in means and variances approach

Travel by bus is an efficient, cost-effective, safe and preferred means of intercity transport in many advanced countries. On the contrary, there is huge public sentiment about the safety records of intercity buses in low- and middle-income countries given the increasing bus-involved road traffic crashes and high fatality rates. This study sought to model the injury severity of intercity bus transport in Ghana using the random parameters multinomial logit with heterogeneity in means and variances modelling technique to account for unobserved heterogeneity in the dataset. The dataset involves crash data from the 575 km long Accra-Kumasi-Sunyani-Gonokrom highway in Ghana. Four discrete crash outcome categories were considered in this study: fatal injury, hospitalized injury, minor injury, and no injury. The study observed that crashes involving pedestrians, unlicensed drivers, and drivers and passengers aged more than 60 years have a higher probability of sustaining fatal injuries. Also, speeding, wrong overtaking, careless driving and inexperienced drivers were associated with fatal injury outcomes on the highway. The incidence of intercity bus transport crashes involving larger buses and minibuses were also found to more likely result in fatalities. The probability of hospitalized injury increased for crashes that occurred in a village setting. Given these findings, the study proposed improvement of the road infrastructure, enforcing seatbelt availability and use in intercity buses, increased enforcement of the traffic rules and regulations to deter driver recklessness and speeding as well as improving the luminance of the highways. Additionally, apps that have features for customers to rate intercity bus operators, the quality of services provided, and also have the option to report reckless driving activities can be developed to promote safe and inclusive public transport in the country.

Understanding small Chinese cities as COVID-19 hotspots with an urban epidemic hazard index

Multiple small- to middle-scale cities, mostly located in northern China, became epidemic hotspots during the second wave of the spread of COVID-19 in early 2021. Despite qualitative discussions of potential social-economic causes, it remains unclear how this unordinary pattern could be substantiated with quantitative explanations. Through the development of an urban epidemic hazard index (EpiRank) for Chinese prefectural districts, we came up with a mathematical explanation for this phenomenon. The index is constructed via epidemic simulations on a multi-layer transportation network interconnecting local SEIR transmission dynamics, which characterizes intra- and inter-city population flow with a granular mathematical description. Essentially, we argue that these highlighted small towns possess greater epidemic hazards due to the combined effect of large local population and small inter-city transportation. The ratio of total population to population outflow could serve as an alternative city-specific indicator of such hazards, but its effectiveness is not as good as EpiRank, where contributions from other cities in determining a specific city’s epidemic hazard are captured via the network approach. Population alone and city GDP are not valid signals for this indication. The proposed index is applicable to different epidemic settings and can be useful for the risk assessment and response planning of urban epidemic hazards in China. The model framework is modularized and the analysis can be extended to other nations.

A Two-Phase Approach for Predicting Highway Passenger Volume

With the continuous process of urbanization, regional integration has become an inevitable trend of future social development. Accurate prediction of passenger volume is an essential prerequisite for understanding the extent of regional integration, which is one of the most fundamental elements for the enhancement of intercity transportation systems. This study proposes a two-phase approach in an effort to predict highway passenger volume. The datasets subsume highway passenger volume and impact factors of urban attributes. In Phase I, correlation analysis is conducted to remove highly correlated impact factors, and a random forest algorithm is employed to extract significant impact factors based on the degree of impact on highway passenger volume. In Phase II, a deep feedforward neural network is developed to predict highway passenger volume, which proved to be more accurate than both the support vector machine and multiple regression methods. The findings can provide useful information for guiding highway planning and optimizing the allocation of transportation resources.

Influencing Factor Analysis and Demand Forecasting of Intercity Online Car-Hailing Travel

Online car-hailing travel has become an important part of the urban transportation system and is gradually changing the mode of intercity travel. Analyzing and understanding the influencing factors of intercity online car-hailing travel hold great significance for planning and designing intercity transportation and transfer systems. However, few studies have analyzed the influencing factors of intercity car-hailing travel or forecast travel demand. This paper takes trips between Yinchuan and Shizuishan, China, as the research case and analyzes the influence of time, space, passengers, and the environment on intercity online car-hailing travel. The relationship between the urban built environment and intercity online car-hailing travel demand is also investigated through a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model. We find that the peak hours for intercity car-hailing trips are between 9:00 and 10:00 and between 16:00 and 18:00, which are significantly different from those for intracity trips. Weather conditions strongly affect the mobility of intercity trips. The urban built environment also has a significant impact on intercity car-hailing ridership, and residential districts and transportation facilities are the factors with the greatest influence on intercity online car-hailing travel. These results can provide practical help to city managers improve the management of intercity traffic and develop better transportation policies.